The Bible reveals that mankind, beginning with Adam and Eve, was created, body and soul, in the image and likeness of God, in perfect conformity to the glory of His righteous nature and character in our inner man, while manifesting the beauty and excellencies of His infinitely glorious being in our physical bodies. As such, they were given dominion or rule over all of God’s good creation, under God’s loving rule over them.
Isaiah 43:7 reveals that God’s purpose for creating us as such was and is for His Glory; that the infinite perfections of His Being would be displayed in and through men and women for our eternal enjoyment of God and one another, and ultimately for God’s enjoyment of His image bearers coming to know, love and enjoy Him and one another, as well as all of the rest of His good and glorious creation (Genesis 1:27-31).
Adam was given the responsibility of keeping/protecting the garden temple he and Eve inhabited in intimate relationship with God (Genesis 2:15). They were both given the glorious privilege and responsibility of, through physical intimacy in marriage, bringing other like beings into God’s good creation, so that through the generations, God’s glory would fill the earth (Genesis 2:24-25).
However, we know that is not how things transpired. Adam failed to keep/protect God’s Garden paradise from the entry of evil, which resulted in his disobedience to God’s one command wherein he believed and obeyed the word of the serpent, the evil one who we now know as the devil, over the word of God. In doing so he brought sin, corruption and death into God’s good creation, and gave the devil a foothold in the affairs of man (Genesis 3:1-6) (Romans 5:12) (1 John 5:19).
Upon Adam’s eating of the forbidden fruit, we see the image of God in both him and Eve immediately corrupted (Genesis 3:6-7), resulting in them being banished from the presence of God, into a now sin cursed world (Genesis 3:17-24). Thus, instead of reproducing and filling the earth with offspring perfectly conformed to the nature and character of God, Adam produced offspring who would more image the nature and character of the one whose word he believed over God, namely the devil (John 8:44) (1 John 3:10).
The devil will now exercise great influence over the sin corrupted world of fallen mankind, and man’s dominion over the earth will be opposed by nature itself, just as man has opposed God. (Revelation 12:9) (Romans 8:20-22).
Romans 1:18-32 and Romans 3:9-18 make it clear that all mankind, as the sin corrupted descendants of Adam, are totally depraved, corrupted by sin in every aspect of our being – body, mind, intellect, emotions, affections and will. In this condition we are neither inclined nor even able to know and love God wholly with heart, soul, mind, and strength, but rather are inclined by our fallen nature to serve our own will and desires, while rejecting and opposing His – seeking our joy, our pleasure, our satisfaction, our significance in the sin corrupted creation rather than in the infinitely glorious creator.
Thus, mankind’s desperate condition as revealed in the Bible is that of being unrighteous (Romans 3:10), dead in trespasses and sins (Ephesians 2:1), living in an increasingly evil and morally confused world (2 Timothy 3:1-5), without hope and without God (Ephesians 2:12), destined for death and Hell (Psalm 9:17).
However, the Bible reveals that God’s eternal plan was from the beginning, to redeem creation and restore the image of God in man to the glory which God intended. It would not be restoration to the image of Adam before he sinned, but a new creation in the glorious image and likeness of the incarnate Son, Jesus Christ (2 Corinthians 5:17).
Jesus, motivated by a passion for His Father’s glory, and compassion for the fallen race of mankind, comes into this world as a man, to live as man as God intended, imaging the brightness of His glory in all that He would say and do, and ultimately in all that He would become in His glorified, resurrected body as the first born, the heir and preeminent one of God’s new creation (Hebrews 1:1-3) (Romans 8:29).
Jesus came into a world that was far from the garden paradise Adam lived in. It was a world manifesting the ugly corruption of sin, a world filled with misery, conflict and death, imaging little of God’s good creation, much like our world today.
We are told in Acts 10:38 that Jesus, as a man enabled by the Holy Spirit, went throughout Israel, doing good, perfectly exercising dominion over all of the natural and spiritual creation, destroying the devil’s works and lies in the lives of the people He touched, which God will ultimately do for all He redeems and transfers out of the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of his beloved Son (1 John 3:8) (Colossians 1:12-14).
Jesus, unlike Adam, would perfectly love and obey the Father with all of His heart, mind, soul and strength, an obedience that would culminate in His submission to a shameful and agonizing death on a Roman cross (Philippians 2:6-11). There he would, on behalf of all He would call to Himself out this sin condemned world, pay the due penalty for their sins, so that those who put their faith in Jesus would be justified, justly forgiven of all their sins, declared righteous, and enabled by the Holy Spirit to live their lives to the glory of God (Romans 3:21-26) (1 Peter 2:24) (2 Corinthians 5:15).
Jesus, again, unlike Adam who brought death into the world, would, through His substitutionary death and subsequent miraculous resurrection, bring life, eternal life, the life that God created man to enjoy with Him, to all who would come to love Him with all their heart, soul, mind and strength (Luke 10:25-28).
This life, as noted in Romans 6:23, is a gift. It is an act of sovereign grace in which God the Holy Spirit comes to live in men, women and children who are spiritually dead in their trespasses and sins, objects of God’s judgement and wrath, living obedient to the lies of the devil. Through the hearing of the gospel and by the supernatural work of the Spirit they are made spiritually alive, changed at the core of their being, given a new heart with new affections, new desires, new longings and new motivations that are centered on knowing, loving and being loved by God (Ephesians 2:1-9) (Ezekiel 36:25-27).
This is referred to in scripture as being born again or regeneration (John 3:3-8) (Titus 3:4-7) (1 Peter 1:3).
From the moment one is born again, God begins the work of conforming us to the image of Christ, a work that ends with our glorification when we will be perfectly conformed to the image of God in Christ, in both body and soul, in a new heaven and new earth, never again to know the corruption and misery of sin (Romans 8:29-30) (1 John 3:1-3) (Philippians 3:20-21) (Philippians 1:6) (2 Peter 3:13).
But until that day, we who have entrusted our lives to Jesus Christ remain in the process of becoming who and what we were created to be (2 Corinthians 3:18).
Grace and Peace ×